Dante's POV
I woke to the stillness of my childhood room, the bed empty beside me, yet I couldn’t shake the sense that she had been there moments ago. Lily. The memory of her warmth, subtle but lingering against me, pressed into my chest in a way that unsettled me more than I wanted to admit.
I had held her, not consciously, not intentionally, but the ghost of her presence remained. My body remembered what my mind refused to fully acknowledge. I didn’t move immediately, simply letting the quiet of the morning fill the room, my eyes tracing the familiar angles of the space I had grown up in. The trophies, the old photos, the faint scent of lavender from the curtains—all of it seemed sharper, more intimate somehow, because I could imagine her there, soft and alive against me.
I rose eve
